Are there poems that make you afraid? (Poem post: fear and poetry)

[radiantfracture]

The New Yorker: Poetry: Dorothea Lasky Reads Louise Bogan

This was going to be a podcast-Friday post, but then it was more poem- than podcast-centric, and then it wasn't Friday any more. I liked the podcast episode, but mostly I liked Dorothea Lasky's discussion of Louise Bogan's poem "Little Lobelia's Song."

Imaginary Photograph: Dorothea Lasky laughing apologetically as she changes my brain about poetry and fear.

Lasky has a new collection coming out, The Shining, about her obsession with that film, and so she's been thinking about the poetry of fear.

You know, I hadn't really thought of poems as a source of fear -- even that which evokes fear, or terror, or horror, is transmuted into awe by the aesthetic context. Every angel is terrifying, but also sort of hot.

Emily Dickinson can freak me out -- "I felt a funeral in my brain." There's "The Colonel" by Carolyn Forché. That has horror. Maybe "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" freaks me out a little?

Are there poems that evoke fear for you? Not just describe it, but make your body awaken to danger?

Anyway, Lasky convinced me about Louise Bogan. The deepest knowledge I had of Bogan's work until now was from the nine-minute Essential American Poets episode about her. So I was sleeping on Louise Bogan, and now I'll never sleep again.

Lasky chose the triptych "Three Songs," published in The New Yorker in 1967 and in her collection The Blue Estuaries in 1968.

Here's the first of the three, a weird little singsong right out of a horror film:

Little Lobelia's Song

I was once a part
of your blood and bone.
Now no longer --
I'm alone, I'm alone.

Each day, at dawn
I come out of your sleep;
I can't get back.
I weep, I weep.

Not lost but abandoned,
left behind,
this is my hand
upon your mind.

I know nothing.
I can barely speak.
But this is my hand
upon your cheek.

You look at your face
in the looking glass.
This is the face
My likeness has.

Give me back your sleep,
until you die,
Else I weep, weep.
Else I cry, cry.

* * * * * *

Creepy.

I don't know whether it was just my mood, but as Lasky read out the poems she'd chosen, I exclaimed aloud in my kitchen (mixing the chocolate and butterscotch and peanut butter chips into the batter) -- "what the fuck." The fear felt so present in the lines as she spoke them -- that uncanny fear of the child and of the unconscious, that which comes from you but is alien to you.

Lasky provides some autobiographical context for the poem; it's just as unsettling. Bogan used to wake up crying uncontrollably, and "Little Lobelia" is the name Bogan's daughter gave "the thing that made her cry." Lasky says that "Bogan thought of it as this child ghost inhabiting her ... and making her cry."

"I've always seen rhyme as having a haunting quality, and not necessarily being innocuous," Lasky said, which is a wonderful thought to turn over and try out.

What's the most frightening couplet one could write, I wonder. Maybe post your chilling rhymes below?

{rf}

P.S.I've remembered a poem -- song really -- that terrified me. "The Worms Crawl In" -- it was in a children's book of creepy things and it ruined me.

Comments

[sovay]

Are there poems that evoke fear for you? Not just describe it, but make your body awaken to danger?

When I was twelve or thirteen, I heard the opening of Seamus Heaney's "The Grauballe Man" performed as part of a one-woman show called The Bog Man's Daughter at the Boston Museum of Science and it terrified me: and seems to weep / the black river of himself . . . I remembered the line for years with such child-haunted dread that it physically shocked me to re-encounter it on the page in its proper context as part of the bog cycle of North (1975) by a poet I had just discovered in college and loved. I was not afraid of ghosts as a child; I was afraid of bodies, the uncanny valley of uninhabited flesh. As an adult I can recognize that the round "Have you seen the ghost of Tom" is meant to be creepy-funny, but hearing it sung at night in a tent at a Girl Scout sleepover in the middle of some state park woods I found the question "Wouldn't you be chilly with no skin on?" unspeakably horrible, literally so bad I couldn't put words around why it upset me so much. You're not supposed to be there if your skin isn't on. You aren't supposed to feel heat or cold or anything by the time you're just bones. Is the skin the only thing that keeps us from being a bunch of leftover, shivering bones knocking around in the night? Can you lose it? Can someone just take it off you? (Can you find . . . someone else's . . . to stay warm in? I knew some folktales like that. But wouldn't you still be those cold bones underneath?) So now I write stories and poems some of which are head-on about the sort of things I couldn't think about and couldn't stop thinking about as a child and some of which are not, which strikes me as normal, but the other factor here is that I have a very hard time telling what will upset other people vs. what actually upsets me and therefore I know I've had people tell me that my work freaked them out, but I can't remember examples off the top of my head.

[edit] Much of Gemma Files' Invocabulary (2018) is excellent fear poetry.

Give me back your sleep,
until you die,
Else I weep, weep.
Else I cry, cry.

That sounds exactly like something Pamela Franklin should have been singing at the start of The Innocents (1961), Jesus.

[sovay]

P.S. For an example of a poem that doesn't scare me, but an adaptation of it into a song that does, see Laura Veirs' "Sleeper in the Valley" vs. the original Rimbaud.

[radiantfracture]

You aren't supposed to feel heat or cold or anything by the time you're just bones. Is the skin the only thing that keeps us from being a bunch of leftover, shivering bones knocking around in the night?

I was just now reading back through poetry posts to find something to share in class today, and I came across this poem we talked about, which feels almost like an answer or antidote to the horror of decay, because it looks with love: https://radiantfracture.dreamwidth.org/196734.html

[sovay]

was just now reading back through poetry posts to find something to share in class today, and I came across this poem we talked about, which feels almost like an answer or antidote to the horror of decay, because it looks with love

Yes! What a great re-find. What did your students think of it?

(I don't know when the terror of bodies with no one in them began to change, except that it must have happened by the time my grandmother died when I was fifteen, because the last time I saw her was in the hospital, and even though it is not part of Jewish mourning for the bereaved to be part of the chevra kadisha who wash and wrap the body for burial, I hated the fact that it felt like she had just disappeared into the hospital, never to return. With my grandfather, twelve years ago, I sat with my mother for the two and a half days in a different hospital that turned out to be his deathwatch and it felt like the right thing to do, because it was real. I could see when he stopped being under his skin. And I still hate modern practices of embalming, because they feel like lying about death.)

[siderea]

Hmmm, the problem with your question for me is that I have a taste for poems that require a certain amount of decoding to understand what they're up to, so the horror is not immediately apparent, and doesn't necessarily immediately give one a thrill of fear.

But when you speak of horror in poetry, my mind immediately goes to Browning's "My Last Dutchess", but all the import of what is being said is between the lines. As you figure out what's actually being described, honestly it unfolds kind of like an Edgar Allan Poe short story.

Robert Frost often trades in horror, but he's mighty sly about it. I would argue that properly understood "Stopping by the Woods on a Snowy Evening" should in many people invoke horror, as should his "Design" in people of certain religious sentiments. I remain eternally creeped out by his "Love and a Question", which is much less covert.

P.S. for pure creepiness, Frost's "The Census-Taker", but it's blank verse, if that matters.

P.P.S. Serious content warning for racism: Frost's "The Vanishing Red".

[sabotabby]

I can just imagine this being sung breathlessly in a high-pitched voice over slightly discordant music.

Trying to think of a poem that I find creepy. I'm sure there's rhyming stuff but what comes first to mind, and closest to hand, is Susan Musgrave's A Man To Marry, A Man To Bury. A lot of the poems in it are like the former—just absolutely horrifying—but there's something deeply unsettling in the second.


I did it to attract women

he said; there was no question
of an appeal. He had dressed them up
carefully and tried to conceal the blood.
After his initial disgust over their
badly decomposing bodies he took turns
telling them stories at night.

He had tried to make them eat but their
smell was sickening. They wouldn't co-operate,
they made him feel trapped. Their constant
quarrelling drove him to distraction. This was how
he came finally with their crushed heads to the
police station - calling God as his witness -
a good family man.

The Judas Goat

It was a bad sign I was born under,
half animal, half a cruel joke of nature.
The antlered ghosts of my ancestors were
vanishing; I envied them their shifty universe.

Fate made me plain and bitter,
my shape more symbol than pathfinder or
builder. I wandered from the herd to
escape humiliation - found more misery there
than mystery.

Where I grazed along the wayside
nothing would grow; when I lay down in the
garbage I gave no thought to the flowers.
Skirting the world's edge I thrived on spoils,
glutted my maw, grew reconciled to hunger.

Returning to the flock restored my
dignity. The fat ewes gathered to greet me;
I spoke to them in their own language.
Where I led them to drink there was a warm trough and
plenty to eat. There was a dry place to
lie down; my ease did not betray cowardice.

Lord of everything pleasurable and defenseless,
I woke to their calling resurrected and holy.
There was no need for treachery in their
measure of life; too simple by origin they
followed me to the slaughterhouse.

My power was inimitable and blinding,
When they smelled their own blood they were
no longer afraid. They stumbled and fell
as if my will had supported them. I watched them
weakening, unashamed.

Even their whimpering made me feel ruthless,
the greatness of conquest far greater than
self-sacrifice. But when they lifted their
gentle heads to remind me all would be forgiven,
I turned and looked away.

There on the solitary block I sprawled
rootless and agonizing. Lord God of lolling tongues,
deliverer of carnage.

I prayed I had not become human.

[sovay]

I prayed I had not become human.

That's stunning. This author has a knack for the breath-punch last line.

[sabotabby]

She does. I don't know why this book is out of print—it's her best.

[sovay]

I don't know why this book is out of print—it's her best.

Well, when I can get back into used book stores. Thank you for the introduction.

[sabotabby]

I always enjoy introducing people to Musgrave!

Thoughts

[ysabetwordsmith]

No, poems don't tend to scare me.

I've spent far more time cleaning up after other people's messes, because the way poetry is taught in school is traumatizing for a lot of folks. 0_o

[pantherinsnow]

"The Listeners" by Walter de la Mare is haunting and perfect to me, though not bone-chilling.

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/47546/the-listeners

[larryhammer]

Agreed -- it's a haint, not a source of awful awe.

[sovay]

Agreed -- it's a haint, not a source of awful awe.

I have it mixed up mentally with W. H. Auden's "O Where Are You Going?" which is like satire with horror shot through it. That gap is the grave where the tall return if you say so, Manly Wade Wellman. Behind you swiftly the figure comes softly who invited M. R. James.

[larryhammer]

I can see this confusion.

[jasmine_r_s]

Ooh, great topic! For me, "Caliban upon Seteobos" is scary: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43748/caliban-upon-setebos. And anything, absolutely anything, by Plath.

[larryhammer]

Keats's "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" is a chiller, for me. So are, in different directions, Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" and Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains".

ETA: Oh, and Robinson's "Eros Turannos."

[sovay]

and Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains".

I just realized I forgot the big name nightmare fuel of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est," which my high school Latin teacher read to us senior year when we had just been reading Horace. It was my introduction to Owen. It was terrible to hear. But someone still was yelling out and stumbling / And flound'ring like a man in fire or lime.— Nothing of the aftermath is as bad as that image of unrescuable terror, because it describes someone dying and knowing it, even if the brutally physical last verse leaves them still alive. In all my dreams before my helpless sight, / He plunges at me, guttering, choking, drowning. It's like radiation, the demon of the next war: struggling to get out of something that has already killed you.

[larryhammer]

My senior year of high school, I took World History at a local university through a cooperative extension program. When we got to WWI, the professor started the class by playing Eric Bogle's "No Man's Land," then talked about the horrors of the war, played it again, briefly alluded to his own experiences in Vietnam, then ended the lecture with playing it a third time.

It gutted me. "It all happened again, / And again, and again, and again, and again"

[radiantfracture]

I think I like your professor.

[larryhammer]

I certainly did.

[radiantfracture]

the big name nightmare fuel of Wilfred Owen's "Dulce et Decorum Est,"

Ha -- I recited this at a school assembly in -- 10th? -- grade. I still have fragments by heart.

that image of unrescuable terror, because it describes someone dying and knowing it

Yeah

Many things don't automatically frighten me, but that moment of contemplation, fff k k k.

It's why the only Fear from The Magnus Archives that really gets to me is the Buried.

Oh god, that reminds me -- it's a short story, not a poem -- about a construction project disaster.

It must have been written as some sort of warning, though it was just sitting there near the front of some anthology I read sometime, waiting to scar me for life. It's a series of POV experiences of horrible death via poor safety standards.

Some sort of OSHA-funded anthology? something about labour? I can't remember now.

[sovay]

Many things don't automatically frighten me, but that moment of contemplation, fff k k k.

And both of them know it, the person it's happening to and the person who's watching and can't stop it, and the reader too is trapped witnessing: so we can dream of it now. (Poetry as contagious haunting.)

It's why the only Fear from The Magnus Archives that really gets to me is the Buried.

I still don't know The Magnus Archives, but I can imagine how that one works.

It must have been written as some sort of warning, though it was just sitting there near the front of some anthology I read sometime, waiting to scar me for life. It's a series of POV experiences of horrible death via poor safety standards.

That sounds scarifying! Was it about some famous historical disaster, or just the written equivalent of a public information film?

P.S. *hugs*

[radiantfracture]

Robinson's "Eros Turannos."

Thank you! I had not known this poem, and do find it both chilling in its inexorable progression and haunting in its conclusion. And it seems to me the rhyme is part of the working of that spell -- a ballad?

[larryhammer]

I’ve seen it called ballad-like, though honestly I think it’s more lyric intensity than anything else.

ETA: I forgot to mention, in my anthology of 100 poems by 100 poets, I chose this one for Robinson.

[calimac]

"The Mewlips"

[radiantfracture]

Thank you!

[adore]

i love creepy children's rhymes. here's a favourite:

“My mother, she killed me,
My father, he ate me,
My sister Marlene,
Gathered all my bones,
Tied them in a silken scarf,
Laid them beneath the juniper tree,
Tweet, tweet, what a beautiful bird am I.”

it also appears at the beginning of Barbara Comyns's novel 'The Juniper Tree', and she calls the poem 'too macabre for adult reading.'

[radiantfracture]

Barbara Comyns's novel 'The Juniper Tree',

I love Barbara Comyns! Perversely, I like her least perverse novel best, at least in some moods -- Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's -- but I have read most of her other novels -- having heard about The Vet's Daughter on the Backlisted podcast.

[adore]

i'm so excited to find another reader i can talk about her books with! i like spoons too, but my favourites are the vet's daughter and the skin chairs. my icon is from the first edition of the vet's daughter.

i found barbara comyns thanks to another author, helen oyeyemi, mentioning her work frequently in interviews – she described the vet's daughter along the lines of 'a girl starts levitating and people think it's rude manners' haha.

[radiantfracture]

my icon is from the first edition of the vet's daughter.

Oh, of course! I see it now.

I have read The Skin Chairs but don't remember it well -- what makes it a favorite for you?

Partly I like Woolworth's because it's a little bit of a cheat: a Comyns novel with a relatively happy ending. It probably reads best against the others.

I haven't read Out of the Red, into the Blue, Birds in Tiny Cages, or A Touch of Mistletoe. Do you know any of those well?

I think the voice in Sisters By a River is very clever.

[adore]

I have read The Skin Chairs but don't remember it well -- what makes it a favorite for you?

I tend to love stories about children navigating an adult world, but don't often find books that do that. This book did it particularly well, I thought.

a Comyns novel with a relatively happy ending. It probably reads best against the others.

That makes sense. Comyns novels rarely offer comfort.

I agree with you about the voice in Sisters By A River. It's the most disjointed of all her books, but she writes some haunting imagery, like the goat buried with its horns sticking up above ground, tying her hair around her chin so the bats don't get tangled in it, and licking your hand and pressing it to the wallpaper so that the bird printed on it came off onto your hand.

I haven't read Out of the Red, into the Blue, Birds in Tiny Cages, or A Touch of Mistletoe. Do you know any of those well?

Out of those three, I haven't read Out of the Red, Into the Blue either, and it seems near impossible to get my hands on, but the hope that it will be reissued like many of her other books gives me something to look forward to in life (a biography called Barbara Comyns: A Savage Innocence by Avril Horner is due to release next year so maybe that will encourage some publisher to publish Out of the Red as one of Comyns's more autobiographic works).

Birds in Tiny Cages is not very Comyns-like, but you might enjoy it if you enjoy mid-20th century writing in general. A Touch of Mistletoe was recently reissued by Daunt Books which is how I could get my hands on it, and it's got the classic Comyns heroine, with the grim fairytale view of the world, buffeted by circumstance, experiencing bleak moments in-between and surviving everything, including wartime.

[sovay]

Perversely, I like her least perverse novel best, at least in some moods -- Our Spoons Came from Woolworth's -- but I have read most of her other novels -- having heard about The Vet's Daughter on the Backlisted podcast.

I discovered her with Who Was Changed and Who Was Dead, which I loved at once, and then later the same year ran across The Juniper Tree, and then have read nothing further of hers, I have no idea why.

[radiantfracture]

I like Who Was Changed and have re-read it for the deeply uncomfortable admixture of quirky country childhood novel and nightmarish plague of violent insanity novel. I have The Juniper Tree shelved next door, but remember it less well -- that is, the plot is fairly clear, but not how I felt about it. The Vet's Daughter is a pretty remarkable next read, I would say, if you'd like to revisit.